Originally published on Trevor Trove on December 18, 2015
I don’t know if this will become a regular (or semi-regular) feature but Cat and I have been playing together again recently. We haven’t revisited LEGO Dimensions quite yet (though she played without me while I was at PlayStation Experience, and then when her mom was in town). Instead, we’ve been battling it out in Word Chums on our phones.
Word Chums is essentially a Words With Friends clone, which of course was just a Scrabble clone. Catherine’s mom introduced her to it when she was in town last week and Cat has been enjoying playing against her mom and the computer opponents. A couple of nights ago while we were in bed getting ready to sleep, I went ahead and downloaded it.
Now I tried to warn her that I grew playing Scrabble with my crossword puzzle-obsessed grandmother so I know what I’m doing but she didn’t consider me a credible threat. We played through most of a game that first night until Catherine conveniently fell asleep when I was one turn away from victory. We eventually wrapped up that game with me indeed coming out ahead.
We’re now about fifteen turns into our second game and I just landed an 84-point word (my strategy tends to focus on the double-, triple, and quadruple-point tiles) and she pretty much did the Catherine-equivalent of rage quit on me, putting her phone away and saying, “There’s basically no way I can catch up. You’re no fun!”
So I’m taking note. Either I can treat Catherine like a Wookie and “let her win” (we’re finally seeing Star Wars tomorrow) or avoid competitive games and stay focused on co-operative play where we can have fun together. I’m probably too competitive for the former myself so I think I’ll stick to the latter and find some time to get back to LEGO Dimensions soon.
Thanks for reading!